Reorganize Your Refrigerator With a Station System
You’re probably organizing your refrigerator the same way you’ve been doing for years. If I had to guess, you have condiments in the door, a beverage compartment, and a drawer full of ingredients. It’s classic and nothing to be ashamed of, no matter how inadequate you feel when you see one of those viral “filling the refrigerator” videos on Reels. However, I would recommend a new approach not only to you, but also to the content creators making these videos. Instead of organizing food and drink by type, try creating new types of sections. I will explain.
First outline the sections
This idea came to me after watching a Forbes article about the organization. In it, Chelsea Bothe of True Residential suggested decluttering and organizing your refrigerator into “stations,” either placing them on your refrigerator’s existing shelves and drawers or using a separate, smaller refrigerator to prevent overflow. The purpose of the stations is to categorize your food a little differently. Here are some ideas:
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A dedicated section for the ingredients you’ll need for all of your meals over the next week, broken down by day.
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A section for each member of your family and their favorite foods and drinks.
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Sections for you and your roommates so everyone knows whose food is whose.
Think about the organizational triangle I always talk about. This cleaning philosophy encourages you to keep similar items together and make sure everything has a designated place. In your refrigerator, you probably already store similar items together, such as condiments in one place and leftovers in another. But it can be cluttering, and it can be difficult to see what you already have before heading to the store or making a new recipe. By planning ahead and reconsidering what “similar items” are, you can make sure you have everything you need long before you need it, and also get rid of what you don’t need at all.
Start by taking everything out of the refrigerator and use the decluttering method to cut down on what you don’t need. Then look at what you’ve saved and think about what new kind of categorization strategy might work, whether sorting by day, by person, or another way. If you stick to new categories and keep everything together based on them, you’ll have an easier time figuring out what you need to buy the next time you go shopping.
Next, physically create the partitions
You can do this by designating certain areas of the shelves as well as the drawers, but this really limits the number of sections you can make. Instead, I recommend adding a few removable drawers so you can use up wasted vertical space inside the shelves and fit a lot more sections in there. For example:
With these, you can create enough small sections for each day of the week, each family member, or any other categories that make sense for you and your life. Be sure to dedicate one section for miscellaneous essential foods that are used frequently or that are important to store, and then simply stick to the new routine to keep your refrigerator organized.
As you add new items to your refrigerator, keep everything organized and dated .